File:Pigeons- their structure, varieties, habits, and management (1868) (14577437477).jpg

Identifier: pigeonstheirstru00tege (find matches)
Title: Pigeons: their structure, varieties, habits, and management
Year: 1868 (1860s)
Authors: Tegetmeier, W. B. (William Bernhard), 1816-1912 Weir, Harrison, 1824-1906, ill Hanson, Elisha, former owner. DSI Leighton Bros. (Printer), printer of plates
Subjects: Pigeons Pigeon breeds
Publisher: London, New York : G. Routledge and Sons
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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the fanciers. By pairing together birds in which thesequalities were the most exaggerated, they got bodies still more compact, heads yetrounder, beaks shorter, and feet neater. It was the breeders art carried to theuttermost. As to the beaks, do what the fancier would, they still were not smallenough, and then the penknife was brought into use, to pare them down helow thestandard. The young of the birds so operated on had not, perhaps, smaller beaksthan those originally possessed by their parents, any more than a wooden-leggedman is necessarily the father of a wooden-legged family; but still they sold, andthat was enough. And by coupling the most monstrous individuals of a race, afamily of monsters are kept in existence for a time. Tumblers have been bredwith their beaks so small that they cannot feed their own young, and with theirframes so compact that they cannot fly to the top of their breeders bedstead.They are called Tumblers only because if they could fly they would tumble. The
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BEARDS AND BALDHEADS. THE SHORT-FACED TUMBLER. Ill variation of the species Tumbler has been pushed to its utmost possible limits.Were the hmit exceeded, the bird could not be propagated, if it could exist atall. The Beverend writer is, as usual, graphic, but not strictly accurate. The commonTumbler is not, as he suggests, a bird au nature!. It, like all other varieties, hasbeen obtained by selection and careful breeding from variations occurring in adomestic state; and it is only by carrying out to its extreme the same principleof action that produced the common Tumbler, that the short-faced breed wasproduced. Again, the Tumbler is not a species, but merely a variety derived, likeall other pigeons, from the single species, the Columba Vvvia or wild Eock Dove. Leaving the disputes between the fanciers and the naturalists respecting thecomparative merits of the artificial and natural form to be settled by the dispu-tants themselves, we pass on to the consideration of the short-faced bi

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